These Republicans just told on themselves with a familiar Washington magic trick

There is a familiar Washington magic trick, and Missouri’s U.S. senators perform it with unusual confidence: Spend years denouncing the bipartisan cult of stupid wars, then salute smartly when your own president lights the fuse.

Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt have both marketed themselves as realists, skeptics of permanent intervention and the old foreign-policy catechism. Hawley said in 2019 that the point of American foreign policy is “not to remake the world,” and in 2023 said flatly that “regime change didn’t work.” Schmitt built a parallel brand in softer packaging, attacking the “failed Washington way” on foreign policy, repeatedly calling Donald Trump the “peace president” and insisting he did not want “a forever war in the Middle East.”

And then came Iran, the moment when rhetoric had to cash out and both men opposed the effort to reassert congressional authority over war powers.

Hawley — who had earlier said it would be “a whole different matter” for the United States to affirmatively strike Iran and that he would be “real concerned” by that prospect — found a way to make his peace with it once it was Trump making the call. He defended Trump’s actions as lawful so long as no ground troops were involved.

Schmitt, who had spent months selling Trump’s foreign policy in the language of restraint, landed in the same place. Suddenly the old concerns about executive overreach, strategic drift and another Middle East trap looked less like convictions than talking points with expiration dates.

That is the tell. Politicians change their minds all the time. Hawley and Schmitt change in one direction only: toward Trump.

Hawley ran the same play on Medicaid cuts, warning they would hurt Missouri’s rural hospitals and the people who depend on them. The warning was real enough. Then came the vote, and there he was, backing the bill anyway. Later he moved to soften or undo parts of what he had just supported, which is another neat bit of Washington stagecraft: denounce the harm, help cause the harm, then reappear as the man racing in with a bucket of water.

Schmitt’s contradictions are less theatrical than Hawley’s, but no less revealing. Last year he demanded the Epstein files be released — “Hell yeah. Open it up. Release the Epstein files” — then grew markedly more careful once Trump was back in office, saying only that he was “curious” and would support releasing whatever “credible information” might be there.

A self-proclaimed free speech warrior as Missouri’s attorney general, he seemed perfectly comfortable last year when government pressure bore down on late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel after a joke about the late conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk.

That is the through line with Hawley and Schmitt: every principle has an escape hatch. They are against regime change until their president bombs Iran. Against Medicaid cuts until leadership needs the vote. Against censorship until they do not like what is being said.

What Hawley and Schmitt understand, maybe better than most, is that modern political branding rewards the appearance of rebellion almost as much as rebellion itself.

You do not have to resist the machinery. You only have to speak as if you might. You can sneer at the old consensus, campaign against the old order, strike the pose of the insurgent — and then, when the moment comes, vote like a company man.

• Jason Hancock has spent two decades covering politics and policy for news organizations across the Midwest, with most of that time focused on the Missouri statehouse as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. A three-time National Headliner Award winner, he helped launch The Missouri Independent in October 2020. Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.